Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

We thought he was on PCP or something, one says.

He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.

He’s huge, one exclaims! Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them.

We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased.

And then he was charged with terrorism.

Literally.

Excerpted from When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir © PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS and ASHA BANDELE, 2018. Published by Raincoast Books, raincoast.com

Portrait of Charles Lawrence.

I went to church in August. I hadn’t been in 20 years. It was Monday and St. Paul’s Anglican in downtown Halifax was dead quiet. A young woman in burgundy sat at a table near the door. I looped around the pews before asking the question I had come here to ask: “Charles Lawrence is buried under here, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s up front, to your right,” she said.

It’s a less-than-plain resting place. Battleship-grey floorboards, a flimsy hand-painted family crest; pretty modest for a former governor. I stomp my right heel into the wood. Then my left. I add a toe tap. Stomp. Tap. I sway my body, lift my arms, and stomp again, harder this time, trying to pull a groan from the old boards. No luck. I’m an awful dancer.

The woman at the front pays no attention to my arrhythmic jig. Later she tells me she’s seen quite a few people dance on his grave in her three years working here. Her face reveals no opinion. I suppose she knows I’m Acadian. She said the other dancers were, too, aside from a few Cajuns.

Dancing on someone’s grave is a sign of disrespect. It’s a “ha-ha, screw you, I relish in your demise, and outlast you.” It seems silly, but it’s not. Not here. Charles Lawrence was the racist megalomaniac behind the Expulsion of the Acadians, or Le Grand Dérangement—the forced deportation of almost the entire population of Acadie, about 14,000 people.

The ancestors of those deported haven’t forgotten what he did. The rest of Nova Scotia seems to have. We have two Lawrencetowns and many Lawrence Streets throughout the province. There are no statues to tear down—like the confederate monuments coming down across the American South—but there’s a conversation that needs to happen. I don’t want the history of Charles Lawrence erased—that was his bit—but I want him to be remembered for what he really was: a criminal, a racist, and a horrible man responsible for the displacement and death of thousands of innocent people.

Lawrence didn’t invent the idea behind the Expulsion— it had been around for years—but he put it into action. Since the early days of British rule in Nova Scotia, colonial officials were worried about the political leanings of the Acadians, the original French settlers of the land. The thinking went like this: If England and France went to war, which seemed likely, the Acadians would obviously side with the French, and probably bring along their Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) allies. Even old Edward Cornwallis—former governor of the colony, founder of Halifax, and a shameless racist in his own right—wouldn’t entertain the idea. He asked for an oath, and when this was rejected, he did nothing more; this from a man who put a bounty on Mi’kmaq scalps.

Lawrence was less kind. After a backhanded attempt to force Acadian community leaders to submit to the British Crown—or to use Game of Thrones lingo, to bend the knee—he signed the decree setting about a series of events that add up to nothing less than cultural genocide.

It began in 1755. British soldiers forced Acadians out of their homes dotting the shore of the Bay of Fundy and stuffed them into decrepit transports and decaying naval brigs. The ships called along the bustling British ports of the Thirteen Colonies, dropping off small groups of prisoners at each city. Homeless, linguistically and religiously alienated, and torn from their families, most exiles ended up destitute on the streets or dead. More than a quarter of the 7,000 deported in the fall of ’55 never made it back to dry land, succumbing to wretched ship conditions and disease. Those who escaped to surrounding French territories were hunted down and deported three years later, from Ile St-Jean, the island we now call P.E.I. This time the ships sailed for France; death rates at sea were even higher. Two ships packed with hundreds of prisoners never made it at all, sinking with all hands lost in the frigid North Atlantic.

But some families escaped the fate of the ships. That’s where I come in.

I don’t speak French. The few church events I attended as a kid were Anglican ceremonies. I didn’t even know my last name was Acadian until someone told me two summers ago while I was working as a tour guide in Cheticamp, N.S.—the largest Acadian community in the province. Acadian culture was erased, at least in my family. But I’ve traced my ancestors back to some of the first settlers that arrived in Port Royal in the middle of the 17th century. No one in my family knew of the connection until a few months ago. I’ve been told French was spoken in the house four generations back, but memories are getting foggy. We’ve nearly forgotten. Many of the unlucky souls who landed in the hostile ports of America had their culture physically stolen. For my family, among those who escaped the deportations, the erasure happened much more slowly, but it happened nonetheless.

Mr. Lawrence, I danced on your grave because you deserve it. I drive by towns named after you whenever I go surfing on the eastern shore or apple-picking in the Annapolis valley, and they anger me. Nova Scotia’s need to memorialize you angers me. We talk about removing statues and changing street names a lot in this province, and I want your name added to the list. May you not rest in peace.

Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

When you love something,  you want to know it loves you back. It’s why we look for ourselves in art: We want to see reflections of our struggles acknowledged, and we long to hear stories where we can be heroes. As a Black and Indian child of the 1990s, I was starving to see myself in the media I consumed; besides Will Smith, things were scarce.

In the late ’90s, video games had only started to feature voice acting and recognizably human characters. I wasn’t looking for a relatable dark-skinned character as much as I was looking for a game starring a human being and not a wise-cracking bobcat or a dragon who would become a fast friend.

Since then, much has evolved: From the graphical shifts of eight-bit and 16-bit pixelated characters to 3D polygonal character models in the mid-’90s, to the near-realism and embrace of virtual reality that has defined the 2010s, games of today are unrecognizable when compared to the Super Nintendo titles I played as a child. Today’s games industry rivals Hollywood in both profitability and, more notably, production values.

For the most part, technology is no longer a limiting factor for the creative vision of game developers. If you want photorealistic renditions of known actors, it can be done. Living paintings, playable novels, interactive horror movies: They all exist, and have active fanbases to boot. Almost anything can be created in a video game—and almost anyone. Blockbuster game franchises, such as the globe-trotting treasure hunts of the Uncharted series and the gritty alien warfare of the Gears of War titles, have used performance capture technology to bring life to their digital stars. Made famous via Andy Serkis’s turn as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy starting in 2001 (as well as his turn a decade later as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy), performance capture technology allows a physical actor’s performance on a soundstage to be used as the skeleton for a computer generated character in the final product.

The possibilities, as Serkis has demonstrated, are endless: Free from the limits of their physical bodies, talented actors can embody any role their skills can match.

As more games embraced performance capture technology, I was ready to see how many opportunities a truly colour- and race-blind casting process would create for people of colour in gaming. But my optimism may have been misplaced.

***

The use of performance capture in games has only become notable within the last decade, so examples are relatively limited. But even in its infancy, developers have used the technology in the same, questionable way: to cast white people as non-white characters.

In 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief ’s End and this year’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, two characters that are portrayed onscreen as women of colour—Nadine Ross, a steely South African mercenary, and Chloe Frazer, an Indian-Australian treasure hunter— were voiced and motion captured by white women, Laura Bailey and Claudia Black, respectively. In Gears of War 4, Kait Diaz, a determined Latina soldier, was performed by two people: The motion capture actor, who performs the physical movements of the character, was Aliyah O’Brien, a Canadian of Irish, Spanish, and Welsh descent; the voice actor was, once again, Laura Bailey.

The issue doesn’t resolve itself when we focus on purely voice acting roles in gaming; if anything, it gets worse. From the daughter of a slave fighting for freedom in the historical fantasy of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, to an orphaned girl building a relationship with her adoptive guardian in the choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling of The Walking Dead, some of the most widely celebrated characters of colour in recent years (Aveline de Grandpré and Clementine) have been voiced by white women (Amber Goldfarb and Melissa Hutchinson).

To rely on technological advances to deliver diversity is to engage in active cruelty toward your hopes and dreams. On paper, technology that allows anyone to be anyone else should be the true equalizer in terms of diversity in casting. And in some cases, it has been: Merle Dandridge, an actor of Black and Asian descent, has performed the roles of Black-Asian women, Black women, and an elderly white woman, all in the last few years. But far more often, the games industry has used the smokescreen of digital performance to cast the same handful of mostly white actors across every role possible. It’s literally colourblind casting—there’s scarcely a person of colour to be seen.

***

Video games are a mongrel art form, inheriting the strengths and challenges of every medium that preceded them while dealing with problems that are wholly unique. It’s also a relatively young medium: Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985, Pong in 1972. Every decade brings a massive upgrade in technology that, in turn, transforms the idea of what a video game can be. Performance capture technology is even younger. The technique has its roots in rotoscoping, an animation method popularized by famed cartoonist Max Fleischer in 1915. He would trace over the individual frames of a live-action film reel to create a cartoon character that appeared to move with the fluidity of a human being (popularized in Talkartoons such as “Minnie the Moocher,” which featured the rotoscoped dance moves of Cab Calloway). Rotoscoping was later adopted by animation powerhouses, including Walt Disney, over the following half-century, but it was a time-consuming, labour-intensive process.

Motion capture technology as we know it today was developed as a tool in the field of biomechanics to track and analyze the movements of athletes in the late 20th century it was almost exclusively used for research and educational purposes. The core technology is largely the same: Pingpong ball-like sensors are attached to a bodysuit that the actor wears, allowing a stick-figure rendition of their exact movements to be recorded by a selection of cameras. Performance capture, however, specifically refers to an actor’s facial and finger movements being mapped to a digital character. While the technology has evolved and refined since those early days, the core mechanics remain the same. Today, motion capture studios can be found across Canada, working on projects across television, movies, and games.

But the games industry, like the tech world at large, has a systemic problem attracting and maintaining employees from diverse backgrounds. According to the International Game Developers Association’s (IDGA) 2015 developer satisfaction survey, 75 percent of developers polled identify as male, 73 percent identify as straight, and 76 percent identify as white, European, or Caucasian. Meanwhile, just three percent surveyed were Black, seven percent Latinx, and nine percent East Asian. This homogeneity becomes all the more apparent in a creative field. Video games offer a spectrum to tell unlimited stories in an ever-growing number of formats, yet they’re almost exclusively being told by a single group. This could be a matter of a group of creatives stumbling before they learn to walk, or it could be an accepted evil in the performance world. But it’s easy to trace a line from the lack of diversity behind the scenes to a lack of diverse characters being created, and in turn, a failure to hire and cast actors of colour in digital performance roles.

Canadian developers and motion capture studios are not exempt from this trend. Far Cry 4, an action-adventure romp set during a civil war in a fictional world based on Nepal, was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and released in 2014. In a game stacked with people of colour (and actors of colour to match), it’s more than disappointing that both the lead character, Ajay Ghale (a Nepalese-American) and the primary antagonist, Pagan Min (a brutal monarch born in Hong Kong) were voiced and performed by white men (James A. Woods and Troy Baker). The same goes for Gears of War 4, by Vancouver-based developer The Coalition. Side characters of colour are voiced and motion performed by actors of colour—including some high profile names like Jimmy Smits and Justina Machado. But when it comes to lead characters (including the aforementioned Kait Diaz played by Laura Bailey), well-known white actors tend to show up as people of colour, such as Robin Atkin Downes as heroic Lieutenant Minh Young Kim.

None of these casting choices have created much backlash. While the issue of whitewashing in film has become enough of a social media talking point to result in actual change, the cultural footprint of gaming is too small, and too white, to generate anything close to that level of organized outrage. But that doesn’t mean gamers of colour don’t exist, and it’s no excuse for a young industry to inherit Hollywood’s racism and dismal view of diversity. It’s not too late to believe we can do better.

Then again, the nature of this issue is complicated by the layers of technology inherent to the problem. The #whitewashOUT movement led by American comedian Margaret Cho in response to the release of Ghost in the Shell in early 2017 was easy to grasp: A Japanese character named Major Motoko Kusanagi in a movie set in Japan, based on a Japanese franchise made by Japanese people, was played by Scarlett Johansson. The grievance there is clear and obvious, and a social movement is born.

But digital performance? Voice acting? This is the realm of thought exercises and appeals toward devil’s advocacy. If Black people can sound white, why can’t white people provide the voices for Black characters? If a white woman can speak with a convincing Mandarin-accented English lilt, why should she be excluded from auditioning? All these questions and more can be found in any online message board or Twitter thread about the Uncharted controversy, and they’re not easy to answer. But solutions can be found, if you know where to look.

***

The closest neighbour to performance acting is voice acting, and Roger King, president of Ethnic Voice Talent (EVT)—an agency that gathers voice actors across dozens of accents and languages and helps get them cast for the right roles—has been working in that world for decades. King, a voice actor who traded days in the recording booth for the responsibilities of a talent agent, started EVT to address a growing demand in the market for non-white voices—not just professionally-trained voice actors speaking non-English languages, but accented English roles as well.

The majority of King’s clients work in voice-over in radio ads and narration. But he also casts for animated programs and video games. In the 13 years that EVT has existed, King has seen a marked change in how his industry, and society as a whole, treats the idea of a non-white voice. “Back then, [casting directors] would want character actors to put on these stereotypical voices, with a subtle racist undertone,” says King. A character with an accent would almost always be the butt of the joke in a comedic situation, as if saying “HERE COMES AN INDIAN MAN!” is a punchline in and of itself. “Now, there is little tolerance for anyone trying to ‘put an accent on.’ Casting breakdowns will specifically ask for authentic accents only,” he says.

The story of diversity in the voice acting industry is the history of North American immigration in microcosm. When King first started working as a voice actor, there was demand for ethnic voices predominantly from Europe; today, that demand is skewed toward Asian and Middle Eastern voices, as well as readings in accented English over non-English dialects. Likewise, earlier non-English voice acting was mainly created by minority communities, for those same communities. Over time, non-minority businesses clued into the idea that people who speak Urdu as their first language still need to buy car insurance, and that a mattress ad narrated in Chinese-accented English could draw in new customers.

The push for race-accurate casting came from a few different areas. First, practicality: The advantage of having an actual Jamaican person voice a character over a white guy with a Bob Marley accent is that your intended audience can identify and trust the authenticity of your product. Second, technology: The internet has reduced the cost of entry into voice work to the price of a quality USB microphone and a pop filter. With literally every voice actor in the world within reach, the biggest limiting factor in a project’s ability to generate a diverse cast is the willingness to seek out authentic voices. And technology works both ways—if you fall short in terms of diverse casting, the internet can bring passionate feedback into your home in a big way.

But the third, and final change in the world of casting is the world itself. “There is a genuine interest in cultural sensitivity and respect in our society now,” King says.

I spend far too much time on Twitter to share King’s optimism, but I can’t argue with his position: Within decades, he has watched his industry go from cartoony, Apu-from-The Simpsons caricatures of English speakers with accents to principled projects that will outright refuse to cast voice actors of different races from the characters they are portraying on screen.

So if the voice acting industry is making impressive strides toward respect and authenticity in diversity, why are video games getting it wrong time and time again?

“I don’t know if people in the video game industry are getting lazy and not reaching out to the right groups,” King speculates. “It’s 2017.” I’m inclined to agree with him; if you spend enough time following voice and performance actors in the gaming industry, a handful of the same names start to pop up. They’re all beloved veteran actors, they can inhabit any role, and they’re considered a sure bet when it comes to nailing a key performance for an important character—a crucial factor in an industry that’s cost-intensive and risk averse.

They’re also all white people who performed the voice and motion capture for characters of colour. Actors portraying their own race: It’s the riskiest creative decision of all.

***

Matters of diversity and erasure in the media are only fringe issues if you’ve never felt erased before. Those who have understand the slow insanity of watching shows and movies, reading books and graphic novels, and playing games where there’s no one like you. Unlimited imagination, infinite worlds—and not one where you exist.

What does that say about the average escapist fantasy? How can you escape to a place where you’re not just unwelcome, but you literally don’t exist?

If you’re anything like me, you learn to compromise. I didn’t look like Indiana Jones, but I shared his love of history, archaeology, and old-timey maps. So I chose to see myself in the movies and love them, even though those same movies would see me as a savage devourer of monkey brains. I often felt like a famished mental gymnast, accepting minor injustices and cutting stereotypes as I constantly scavenged for better representations of myself in the media.

Video games as I recognize them today are slightly older than I am. They were supposed to be better, free of the sinkholes that the art forms they emulate have found themselves mired inside. Instead, they are only as flawed or flawless as their creators: a workforce of overwhelmingly white, straight men.

This is how we can have games of infinite narrative potential that still base the majority of their gameplay around shooting and killing the Other. It’s how games can let you create your own character from a select palette of skin tones, but fail to have the facial features and hair options of people of colour—a small detail, but one that reiterates the idea that to a team of graphic animators, my natural-born hair is harder to create and animate than a race of toad-faced alien behemoths.

Most of all, it’s how the miraculous ability to cast any actor in any role becomes a parlour trick; a fun way to turn entire races into a series of digital masks for white actors. It doesn’t have to be this way—the voice acting industry is a testament to that.

But it’s hard to watch a white actress receive universal acclaim for her role as a strong Black woman and wonder if the games industry solved its diversity problem by removing the one variable factor: people of colour.

Canada, in the eyes of many of its citizens, as well as those living elsewhere, is imagined as a beacon of tolerance and diversity. Seen as an exemplar of human rights, Canada’s national and international reputation rests, in part, on its historical role as the safe haven for the enslaved Black Americans who had fled the United States through the Underground Railroad. Today, it is well known, locally and internationally, as the land of multiculturalism and relative racial harmony.

Invisibility, however, has not protected Black communities in Canada. For centuries, Black lives in Canada have been exposed to a structural violence that has been tacitly or explicitly condoned by multiple state or state-funded institutions. Few who do not study Black Canadian history are aware that dominant narratives linking crime and Blackness date back at least to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and that Black persons were disproportionately subject to arrest for violence, drugs and prostitution-related offences throughout Canada as early as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The history of nearly a hundred years of separate and unequal schooling in many provinces (separating Black from white students), which lasted until 1983, is not taught to Canadian youth. A history that goes unacknowledged is too often a history that is doomed to be repeated.

The structural conditions affecting Black communities in the present go similarly under-recognized. In 2016, to little media fanfare, the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (cescr) confirmed that anti-Black racism in Canada is systemic. The committee highlighted enormous racial inequities with respect to income, housing, child welfare rates, access to quality education and healthcare and the application of drug laws. Many Canadians do not know that, despite being around 3 percent of the Canadian population, Black persons in some parts of the country make up around one-third of those killed by police. It is not yet common knowledge that African Canadians are incarcerated in federal prisons at a rate three times higher than the number of Blacks in the Canadian population, a rate comparable to the United States and the United Kingdom. Fewer still are aware that that in many provincial jails, the rate is even more disproportionate than it is at the federal level.

In addition to being more heavily targeted for arrest, because so much of Canada’s Black population was born elsewhere, significant numbers of those eventually released will be punished again by deportation to countries they sometimes barely know, often for minor offences that frequently go unpunished when committed by whites. Black migrants, too, are disproportionately affected by punitive immigration policies like immigration detention and deportation, in part due to the heightened surveillance of Black migrant communities. Black children and youth are vastly over-represented in state and foster care, and are far more likely to be expelled or pushed out of high schools across the country. Black communities are, after Indigenous communities, among the poorest racial groups in Canada. These facts, along with their history and context, point to an untold story of Black subjection in Canada.

Though anti-Blackness permeates all aspects of Canadian society, Policing Black Lives focuses primarily on state or state-sanctioned violence (though, at times, this is complemented with an enlarged scope in instances when anti-Black state practices were buttressed by populist hostility, the media or civil society). The reason for this focus is simple: the state possesses an enormous, unparalleled level of power and authority over the lives of its subjects. State agencies are endowed with the power to privilege, punish, confine or expel at will. This book traces the role that the state has played in producing the demonization, dehumanization and subjection of Black life across a multiplicity of institutions. I use the word “state” throughout this text to include federal and provincial governments, government-funded programs such as schools, social and child services, and the enforcement wings of state institutions such as the municipal, provincial and national police.

The framework of “state violence” throughout this book is used to draw attention to the complex array of harms experienced by marginalized social groups that are caused by government (or government-funded) policies, actions and inaction. This use of the term state violence follows in the traditions of Black feminist activist-intellectuals such as Angela Y. Davis, Joy James, Beth Richie, Andrea Ritchie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others who have contributed enormously to studying anti-Black state violence while also actively organizing against it.

The state is imagined by many to be the protector of its national subjects. But this belief is a fiction—one that can be maintained only if we ignore the enormous harms that have been directly or indirectly caused by state actions. “Valorizing the state as the natural prosecutor of and protector from violence,” writes Joy James, “requires ignoring its instrumental role in fomenting racial and sexual violence.” It is more accurate to say that the state protects some at the expense of others. The purpose of state violence is to maintain the order that is “in part defined in terms of particular systems of stratification that determine the distribution of resources and power.” In a society like Canada that remains stratified by race, gender, class and citizenship, state violence acts to defend and maintain inequitable social, racial and economic divisions. As such, the victims of this violence have been the dispossessed: primarily but not exclusively people who are Indigenous, Black, of colour, particularly those who are poor, women, lacking Canadian citizenship, living with mental illness or disabilities, sexual minorities and other marginalized populations. Often legally and culturally sanctioned as legitimate, the harms inflicted by state actors are rarely prosecuted as criminal, even when the actions involve extreme violence, theft and loss of life. Grave injustices—including slavery, segregation and, more recently, decades of disproportionate police killings of unarmed Black civilians—have all been accomplished within, not outside of, the scope of Canadian law. Not only is state violence rarely prosecuted as criminal, it is not commonly perceived as violence. Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate.

When state violence is mentioned, images of police brutality are often the first that come to mind. However, state violence can be administered by other institutions outside of the criminal justice system, including institutions regarded by most as administrative, such as immigration and child welfare departments, social services, schools and medical institutions. These institutions nonetheless expose marginalized persons to social control, surveillance and punishment, or what Canadian criminologist Gillian Balfour calls “non-legal forms of governmentality.” These bureaucratic agencies, too, have the repressive powers generally presumed to belong only to law enforcement. They can police—that is, surveil, confine, control and punish—the behaviour of state subjects. Policing, indeed, describes not only cops on their beat, but also the past and present surveillance of Black women by social assistance agents, the over-disciplining and racially targeted expulsion of Black children and youth in schools, and the acute surveillance and detention of Black migrants by border control agencies. Many poor Black mothers, for example, have experienced child welfare agents entering and searching their homes with neither warrant nor warning—in some instances seizing their children—as a result of an anonymous phone call. Further, state violence can occur without an individual directly harming or even interacting with another. It can be, in short, structured into societal institutions.

This expansive understanding of state violence allows us, throughout the following chapters, to examine the seemingly disconnected state and state-funded institutions that continue to act, in concert, to cause Black suffering and subjugation. State violence is not evenly distributed across populations, but deeply infused along the lines of race, class and gender. These factors play a significant role in the likelihood of one’s exposure to either direct or structural forms of state violence. State violence has historically impacted and targeted different groups of people throughout history to different degrees, according to shifting notions of race, ethnicity, class and ability—or willingness to subscribe to social norms. In the present, it continues to impact differently marginalized groups of individuals. But it is not arbitrary that Black communities are subject to state violence at such disproportionate rates. Black subjection in Canada cannot be fully understood, and therefore cannot be fully redressed or countered, without placing it in its historical context. The endemic anti-Blackness found within state agencies has global and historical roots and can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade.

Excerpted from Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard. Copyright © 2017 Robyn Maynard. Published by Fernwood Publishing. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Photo courtesy Jagmeet Singh/Twitter.

This month, the NDP and Canada achieved a historical first. Jagmeet Singh, former Member of Provincial Parliament in the Ontario legislature was named the eighth leader of the federal NDP. The moment marked a dramatic shift for the party, which has struggled to connect with youth and racialized voters. But it also signifies new possibilities of what political leadership in Canada can look like.

At the beginning of this leadership race, there were plenty of changes I wanted to see in the NDP: namely, the party needed to return to its bold progressive principles to effectively hold the Liberals to account—particularly on their more progressive campaign promises. My vision? The NDP needed a stronger version of social democracy to emerge from the race, one that would defend and expand on principles such as environmental protection, health care, Indigenous relations, income inequality, and precarious work, all while creating an accessible pathway for the realities of racialized people to be a part of and feel represented by the party. The latter part of my vision weighed a tad more heavier.

A shift to the left is a goal often spoken of within social democratic discourse. It may be to convert to democratic socialism in order to emphasize the need to nationalize and increase public ownership of services; or to strive for a more subdued version of our current economic system that merely addresses the ailments of capitalism. However, what often gets lost in the midst of these conversations are how sexism, racism, and other forms of identity-based discrimination are accounted for. In a diverse country, with a typically three-party system, accounting for these experiences are essential in order to engage and appeal to those who are not white. This two-part version of social democracy, like the one I put forward above, in my observations, has yet to be achieved in Canada. Perhaps until now.  

On October 1, Singh captured 54 percent of the vote on the first round. It may have appeared to be a landslide victory, but the media and Canadians shouldn’t discount the hurdles Singh faced in order to get here—from a public racist heckler, to what often appeared like an “anyone but Singh campaign” during the leadership debates. Withstanding these challenges, some race-watchers, like me, felt that Singh would be the answer to the party’s woes, even while others remained in vigorous opposition.

Singh was largely criticized for what some called his “centrist” policies. To support these centrist claims, comparisons were drawn between Jagmeet’s and Niki Ashton’s campaign. Ashton, a fierce democratic socialist, came out the gate with a proposal for free tuition, a plan for a national pharmacare and dental care program and plan for economic justice. However, what set her apart from the other candidates was her desire to see increased nationalization of public services. Despite being an admirable goal, it’s one that translates poorly to the overall general public—firing up a small subset of Canadians: the highly educated and disenchanted socialist.

The criticisms launched against Jagmeet for not being left enough had me reflecting on what success should look like for the NDP post-leadership race. I’m of the belief that before the NDP can make such a democratic socialist shift, the party needs to bring racialized and young people into the fold. A hard left would not only alienate those who are unfamiliar with the principles of social democracy, much less, democratic socialism; but it would impart a purity test willing to exclude those whose viewpoints don’t exactly line up. This would make it nearly impossible to grow the party and form a pathway for new members to feel welcomed and view the NDP as a place to learn and grow within. A Singh-led NDP can help to fill that gap.

***

While I commend the NDP membership for choosing Singh as their new leader, this important victory simultaneously requires a reflection on the racism entrenched within progressive politics. A lack of sensitivity over racialized voters who opposed the Ontario sex-ed curriculum that Singh worked closely with to help ease their transition were quickly labelled as conservatives during the debate and deemed not worthy of being engaged by the NDP. Furthermore, polling put forward during the race to determine whether Quebec is ready for a racialized, turban-wearing leader were disturbingly received with a sense of normalcy. As a progressive party that prides itself as the “social conscience” of Canada, an evaluation on whether Canadians are ready to have representation by historically marginalized groups are unacceptable. Public readiness should never be polled and used as justification when determining whether a person’s race or religion deems them appropriate for a job. The smear campaign launched against the new members Singh brought into the party—who were predominantly racialized—barely received an ounce of criticism from his opponents or the party. Singh still came out victorious, but this doesn’t mean that the racism plaguing progressive politics has been defeated.  

During this time, lest we forget that urge of institutions and political entities to use racialized people as props, either to win votes or receive a surge in popularity. The tendency to want to appear inclusive and responsive to the changing demographics of Canada, at times, often overrides the need to actually do the necessary work to address and/or change both pre-existing attitudes and workplace culture—all of which are necessary for people of colour to thrive and be successful. Political institutions and parties of all stripes are guilty of this.

Without a doubt, Singh’s win is a pivotal moment for the party. But he is not the only charismatic, progressive-minded person of colour working hard to join and take on leadership roles within the NDP. The stories often missing from this historic moment are the countless racialized organizers, volunteers, and candidates who see the NDP as a party worth joining—partly in fact due to Singh and the courage he displayed when he joined the race. He did what many saw as an impossible, inspiring a new generation of future political leaders.

It is now the responsibility of the NDP to support and nurture these candidates, new members, or those simply interested in the political vision the party has to offer, to encourage them and provide them with the resources that are needed in order to be successful. The party cannot rest on their laurels now that they have a person of colour at the helms of their leadership. This act of history-making must be followed-up with an organizational shift in attitude and approach. In doing so, the NDP can then truly be a party where justice, inclusion, and equity is not only preached but also enacted from within. 

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Photo courtesy of James Michael Yeboah.

James Michael Yeboah isn’t shy about his feelings. “I’m really sensitive. I cry all the time,” he says. That was the inspiration behind his first solo show, When Black Boys Cry. The Toronto-based painter says a lot of the subject matter within his project is about what he saw within himself. “Those ideas of me being a cry baby as a Black man, me being vulnerable enough to do that, is not talked about.”

Yeboah says that his show, which debuted in August, creates a space for people to express the feelings they are often afraid to. The show included 12 original paintings, each of faces depicting sorrow, sadness, and fear. “We as Black men don’t get to express that sense of vulnerability at all,” he says.

The project started off as an exploration of masculinity in general. Yeboah was already making art that exhibited this idea but he wasn’t yet sure how to communicate his message. Instead, he decided to tighten the show’s focus on Black masculinity and the ways in which it is ill represented. “I came to realize over time that being emotional as far as masculinity goes [within the Black community] is very seldom talked about,” he says.

Yeboah began mulling over these ideas in October 2016 but didn’t start seriously pursuing the project until January 2017, after being accepted for a grant from arts initiative CUE.

“I have always wanted to pursue art from the time I was a kid,” he says, “so it’s really awesome to actually see it through. Seeing a dream come to fruition—that’s a really good feeling.”

The idea of what constitutes strength is a major concept within the project. “For the most part that doesn’t get expressed from Black men.” He explains that we are taught that not showing emotion is supposed to be exhibiting strength. With the show, he is hoping to turn that on its head. He wants the message that comes out of it to be that exhibiting emotion shows true strength. Being vulnerable is being strong.

The themes of the show also speak to the Trump administration and police brutality in North America, but the main theme is decolonization of Black masculinity. “We adopt a very whitecentred form of masculinity of how we frame ourselves as men. My intention is to take away from that and deconstruct that image; to take apart these preconceived notions of what a Black man is and recreate it in a way that we as Black people see fit.”

Yeboah says he hopes that people coming to see the show will leave with a better understanding of their own sense of emotion when it comes to being a Black man. Viewers can then pass these ideas on to their kids. He wants future generations to understand that masculinity is not just one preconceived set of ideals.

“There’s no preset to being a man,” Yeboah says. “That’s what leads to toxic masculinity, and within the community that leads to issues like misogynoir [misogyny directed toward Black women], homophobia, and transphobia.”

Yeboah’s goal, he says, is to create a mutual sense of vulnerability: “I want to normalize the idea, it’s not something you should hide.”

Columnist Margaret Wente. Photo courtesy of the Globe and Mail.

Margaret Wente is confused about racism. That is the most generous interpretation I can offer for her recent Globe and Mail article, “The good news about racism,” in which she argues that racism is vanishing from society. It is declining at such a rate, in fact, that the recent resurgence of white supremacy is a negligible blip, because “overtly racist behaviour…has become taboo.” Wente seems to have mistaken the fact that racism has been acknowledged as a societal factor with the end of racism entirely. She seems to have confused an improved sense of decorum around tragedies with the end of them altogether.  

Wente is a shrewd woman: She does not attempt to argue that discrimination is entirely non-existent. She relents, as an example, that Black and Indigenous men “can expect” to be stopped by police due to their skin colour—but still decries “systemic” racism as an invention of the progressive left. In her requisite admission that racism is not entirely a fabrication, however, she points to one of the most pervasive examples of systemic racism: the Ontario police practice of carding.

Wente believes that those who call out systematically discriminatory practices are, at best, malingering. At worst, they are the undercover agents of the progressive left. Why? Because she believes that since overt racism is passé—it is automatically on its way out. But racism isn’t going away, and we are not making progress “by every measure available.” Us white people are merely becoming aware of what has been going on around us. The work, for the most part, has yet to be done. Still, the exhaustive effort of acknowledging racism as a fact makes Wente want to believe that racism is no longer a defining feature of our society. And she wants you to believe it, too.

While Wente declined to define the terms she sarcastically put in quotes, systemic racism is a phrase coined by sociologist Joe Feagin to describe anti-Black practices that are institutionally entrenched in society. “Structural” racism refers to one of the ways systemic racism manifests itself, and is defined by Frances Henry and Carol Tator as “inequalities rooted in the system wide operation of a society.” The hallmark of systemic racism is that this form of discrimination is embedded in society: It does not require its agents to be hateful, or even personally bigoted. It is self-perpetuating: It only requires that we do nothing at all.  

In her article, Margaret Wente proved hasty to dismiss the concerns of marginalized folks. In this spirit, she joyfully brought us the Good News of racism: It’s not as bad as you think! Wente’s gospel springs from a 2017 study conducted by criminology professor Brian Boutwell and his team. Using data obtained from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Boutwell et al attempted to assess the prevalence of perceived discrimination in the United States. But the Add Health questionnaire is poorly suited to measure racial discrimination—likely because this was never its intended purpose.

Add Health itself was a comprehensive study designed to follow a nationally representative sample of twins from early adolescence to young adulthood. The aim of the questionnaire was primarily to provide measurement on “friendship networks, school activities and health conditions.” Because the survey was not designed specifically to study racism or discrimination, the sample is not consistently adjusted to reflect an evenly intersectional population. This is notable in one area in particular: As the authors of the Add Health study acknowledge in their recruitment analysis, “Add Health…oversampled African American adolescents with highly educated parents.” It has been repeatedly proven that a higher level of parental education correlates with higher socioeconomic status, and economic status itself is a protective factor against discrimination of any kind. This sampling flaw, however, seems to have been overlooked in Boutwell’s secondary analysis.

Boutwell only examined the results of two questions from the Add Health questionnaire:

“Question one: In your day-to-day life, how often do you feel you have been treated with less respect or courtesy than other people?

Question two: What do you think was the main reason for these experiences?”

Participants were only allowed to choose one response from a list of 11 mutually exclusive categories. Women and LGBTQ folks were not given the opportunity to report multiple experiences of discrimination, but instead had to decide which they felt was most pressing. The most common category selected? “Other”—making up a plurality of responses within every subgroup. With the Other category removed, race was the most common reason selected across Black, Asian, and Hispanic subgroups.

The wording of the questions is also troubling. In a study about discrimination, where the results are based exclusively on participant response, the word “discrimination” does not appear anywhere in the survey question. Neither does any approximation of this term. And because Boutwell et al didn’t conduct the questionnaire themselves, the participants had no context for their answers: Lack of respect or courtesy and discrimination are in no way mutually exclusive terms. Boutwell et al are out of their depth making claims about racial discrimination. Quite simply, they didn’t ask the question.

But of course, the Boutwell study is only one prong of Wente’s argument. The other? You (meaning her) just don’t see racism that much anymore. When racial tragedies are splashed across the headlines, the public responds appropriately. It doesn’t matter that these things continue to happen: What matters is that now it would be considered impolite not to send your thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. Sure, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, and sure, in Thunder Bay, Ont., “Indigenous kids have been found in local rivers.” But systemic racism? That’s just the last gasp of those “invested” in the narrative of racism. You know, those who profit from it.

Conservative pundits joke about a kind of racism so insidious it’s “invisible”—but it isn’t. It is, however, easy to ignore if you are white and unwilling to take people of colour at their word. Systemic racism has existed long before us and it will continue to function unless it is purposefully dismantled. Racism can thus exist in an organization like the police force, independent of the intentions of individual officers, through discriminatory mandates and practices set up long before polite society became #woke.

Ontario’s police practice of carding is one example of these mandates. Carding refers specifically to the Community Contacts Policy, an intelligence-gathering policy that allows police to randomly stop, identify, and document community members. An analysis by the Toronto Star in 2013 showed that this policy has had unequivocally discriminatory results. The Star found that Black, Indigenous, and people of colour were more likely than white people to be targeted in every single patrol zone across Toronto; in predominantly white zones, the disparity increased. The analysis also revealed a grim but telling statistic: “Looking solely at young [B]lack male Toronto residents, aged 15 to 24…the number who were ‘carded’ at least once between 2008 and 2012—in the police patrol zone where they live—actually exceeds by a small margin the number of young [B]lack males, aged 15 to 24, who live in Toronto.”

Wente acknowledges that despite the good intentions of individual actors in the police force, the organization as a whole is incapable of functioning without racial bias. She says as much in her concession that we as Canadians are not, in fact, perfect: “Most [B]lack or Indigenous men,” she admits, “can expect to be stopped by police because of their skin colour.” To live with the expectation that you will be randomly stopped by the police in your own neighbourhood, due to you skin colour alone, is to live under the thumb of systemic racism. Wente can sneer at the terms we have chosen to define these problems, but she herself acknowledges the truth behind them. She admits that systemic racism is real and visible when she admits that she is aware of pervasive, policy-based discrimination enacted by the police force.

Wente knows that millions of people across North America still experience discrimination. But, unfortunately for all of them, she does not find this knowledge terribly compelling. She does not seem to find evidence of lived discrimination much more than a tedious vestige of ancient history (after all, the last segregated Black school in Ontario was closed in the distant past of 1965). If your example of racism isn’t utterly grotesque to behold, if it is instead the story of a quiet but pervasive injustice, then your story can’t be trusted—you must be “invested” in the racism narrative propagated by the progressive left.  

Wente is not affected by the problems of systemic racism, so she chooses to believe that nobody is. If nine out of 10 people can tolerate the idea of an interracial marriage, that’s a win. If “onlookers are outraged” by outward displays of white supremacy, we are living in a post-racial epoch. If Quebec can find the space to bury the Canadian victims of a terrorist attack, committed in a place of worship, due to the perceived otherness of said place of worship? Well then, Margaret Wente thinks we’re doing pretty darn good.

A CN train passes through Africville in 1965. Photo courtesy of Bob Brooks/Nova Scotia Archives.

Fifty years ago, the city of Halifax destroyed the historic Black Nova Scotian community of Africville, demolishing its church and homes and forcibly relocating nearly 400 residents. In 2010, Halifax’s mayor apologized and funded the rebuilding of the Seaview United Baptist Church. The following year, the mayor, in response to activism by former residents, also renamed a commemorative park after Africville. But for many, the reparations do not sufficiently address the devastating effect the loss of Africville has had on Nova Scotia’s Black community. More than 40 descendants have been seeking compensation for communal lands through a class action lawsuit since 1996.

Anti-Black systemic racism remains rampant across the province. In Halifax, Black people are three times more likely to be street-checked than white people. Black Nova Scotians are overrepresented in child welfare and incarceration systems. Black students are suspended at disproportionately high rates. Last fall, when Halifax’s North End elected Lindell Smith, he became the city’s first Black councillor in 16 years.

At the same time, members of the North End’s Black community gathered at a meeting to mourn and discuss the deaths of several young men to gun violence. When the community requested the event be private, some white residents were outraged over being excluded. Meanwhile, in rural areas, Black communities like Lincolnville and Shelburne endure severe environmental racism, with nearby landfills polluting the air and water.

For the most part, white Nova Scotians ignore and dismiss these issues. The willful ignorance serves a purpose. As poet and activist El Jones writes in the Halifax Examiner, “By erasing the historical Black presence in Canada, and the anti-Blackness ingrained in Canadian history, Canada is able to present itself as a peaceful, progressive, and multicultural nation.”

New Eid stamp, unveiled this May. Photo courtesy of Canada Post.

 I hadn’t been this excited about a stamp since I collected them back in Grade 6.

Canada’s first commemorative Eid stamp was unveiled just days before the holy month of Ramadan was set to start this May. I caught one of two launch events in Montreal. I expected to see Quebec’s mainstream media outlets well represented. But there was not a single journalist, beyond ethnic media, in attendance.

It reminded me of last summer, when the organization I work for, the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), along with community representatives, was holding six simultaneous press conferences across the country to launch the Charter for Inclusive Communities, a document that reaffirms Canadians’ commitments to inclusion and to express opposition to all forms of hate and discrimination. The launch was covered extensively in all but one province: Quebec.

Quebec media, it seemed, was only interested in Muslim stories when there was a bad-news angle.

At a 2016 NCCM youth workshop in Montreal exploring Islamophobia in the media, 94 percent of participants said they felt media portrayals of Muslims in Quebec were negative. This was the highest of Ontario, Alberta, and Manitoba, where we held similar workshops. “The media either intentionally or indirectly portray Muslims as outsiders [or] a threat,” noted one Montreal participant. “They still don’t have the literacy and awareness.”

This reality came into sharp focus following the tragic terrorist attack on a Quebec City mosque on January 29. Politicians, media, and community members alike immediately pointed to the province’s media landscape as a key driver of anti-Muslim attitudes. It was clear that the media landscape—specifically the French-language media—had been too often scapegoating, fear mongering, and promoting stereotypes about Muslims.

Universite Laval’s Colette Brin says the province’s shock-jock radio hosts frequently target minority groups, especially Muslims. “There’s this strong discourse [against] people who they see as wanting to change society, who are asking for special rights,” Brin told The Canadian Press following the massacre. “There’s the fear of Islamic terrorism and the generalization that the Muslims’ Islamic faith in general is the problem.” 

This has human rights implications. Galvanized by a far-right anti-Muslim group with a strong presence on Facebook, less than a handful of residents in Saint-Apollinaire voted this past July to reject the establishment of a Muslim cemetery. That was enough to scuttle the proposal.

Part of the problem is a lack of media representation. “[The media] don’t have information about real Muslims. They don’t ask Muslims about the real Islam,” a regular congregant at the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, the site of the attack, told journalists. One host working for radio poubelle (literally “trash talk radio”) admitted that in all the years he’d been talking about Muslims, he’d never even invited a single community member on his program. That admission spurred at least one community activist to reach out and urge radio stations to invite Muslims onto their airwaves. There was only nominal interest, which quickly fizzled out.

Nevertheless, community members do acknowledge a change. “It made us all stop, breathe and do some deep thinking,” writes Montreal activist and interpreter Nermine Barbouch in an email. “Many haters, racists, and Islamophobes have even changed their minds and views. Regardless of their opinion on their fellow Canadian citizens of Muslim faith, they… did not want to be part of this crime and they did not want their words and [Facebook posts] to inspire other haters to insanity.”

Haroun Bouazzi, president of Association des Musulmans et des Arabes pour la Laïcité au Québec, agrees. “There is more sensitivity,” he says.

Individuals with anti-Muslim biases also seem to be getting less air time, says Shaheen Junaid, a Montreal board member with the Canadian Council of Muslim women. “The deaths of our six brothers was not in vain,” she says, seeming hopeful.

Public perceptions seem to be changing, too. Polling by Angus Reid show an upswing in positive attitudes toward Muslims in Quebec; doubling between 2009 and 2017, with the most positive level recorded shortly after the attack.

This doesn’t surprise Sameer Zuberi, a long-time Montreal resident who also works to promote greater understanding among diverse communities. “We were in the papers for a full week, being humanized on every page of the paper,” he says. “The average person who doesn’t have any deep-seated prejudices had their eyes open and it counter balanced to some extent the years of negative media on Quebec Muslims.”

Still, Zuberi says, Canadian media needs to recruit more Muslim journalists—and not just those writing about their own faith. At the Montreal Gazette, for instance, popular blogger Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed began writing a monthly column following the attack in Quebec City. Her most recent columns include reflections on the community spirit that emerged during the devastating floods that swept through parts of Quebec, as well as a profile of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of the West Island.

But it shouldn’t take a tragedy to convince media outlets that more positive coverage is necessary to help foster cohesive communities. Given mainstream media’s struggle to make a profit, reflecting diverse audiences—and therefore attracting more revenue—would be an obvious priority.

As for me, I’ll be out buying my commemorative stamp that too few Quebecers will likely know about or appreciate—unless our own communities shout the good news from the rafters.